[2020] This community needs to take off their blinders and be more critical of the company in order to keep the game alive.

We've never once said "Vote democratic" or anything resembling it. All of the other keywords I use, such as SupportBlackCreators, have zero to do with politics and align with our goals of creating an inclusive and welcoming community. It's our responsibility to ensure that everyone sees themselves as welcome and represented in the Spellbreak community.

We have convictions behind our belief. We've made donations to the NAACP LDF, have raised funds as a studio for the Marsha P. Johnson Foundation (on our personal time), and will continue to support causes that align with our studio values, such as Extra Life for Kids.

We are very clear as to the reason for the community streams. From the onset, we always clarify the purpose of the streams (to answer viewer questions and engage with players through viewer games and chat), and never market them as anything but.

The people who stream for you on Tuesday and Thursdays are part of the Community team. We cannot diagnose bugs on stream, nor can we fix them. What we can do is acknowledge them, and let you know that it's something we're working on. We can also engage you by sharing our experience, and frustrations, as players.

We also use these streams as an opportunity to educate and try to help players, especially new players, understand the fundamentals of Spellbreak.

If you don't enjoy the streams, I get it, and will happily take that feedback on. That being said the amount of questions that both Andrew and I field on a weekly basis reinforce the value of the streams; to engage with new players, answer their questions as much as we can, and to direct folks to the community channels where they can connect to the broader Spellbreak community.

Let's go line by line here:

The playerbase has decreased immensely since launch. It's visible in every platform, and in the game itself. There's zero hype for the game currently despite marketing having apparently been put into motion. The first couple weeks this sub went up 5-10k members a day, and has struggled to go up more than 200 a day since. Twitch peaked at it's highest on launch day at 70k and has died down to 2k at most across everyone, any day of the week. "But social media doesn't determine population". You're right, it's just an indicator. But what's your excuse for the getting lobbies full of bots then? There's so much PR bull about "oh it's just a bug where we get bots".... lol they came up with that excuse once people started to complain about it. There is no bot bug. It's filling with bots because not that many people are playing.

People aren't playing because the game feels alpha at best, and the devs would rather tell new players and community members that they just don't know how to play, or they don't know anything about the game, than to take feedback and use it to drive productive development.

Marketing is not currently in motion. There are light executions happening, but by and large, we agree that the game needs more reasons to keep playing, which is why our focus is on expanding the core game and introducing the Chapter system. We are in conversations with folks like Twitch and other potential partners to get the game in front of more eyes, and you'll see the fruits of those discussions in the weeks and months to come.

I also feel that it's important to point out that there are known issues we're working on addressing with how the queues are populating vis-a-vis bots to player ratios, how long a lobby will wait before firing off, etc.

The shop was terrible and full of endless repeats and the reasoning was "well we want people to have a chance before they go away". Yeah, that's why we've seen the same things cycle through with Timberkin 10 times in the last 2 weeks. All skins will be returning with the exception of specials, we haven't seen good shops because their selection is currently small, the time to make a new skin is 2 months+ as they mentioned, and they don't have the ability to produce any sort of content (or bug fixes apparently) in a timely fashion.

We have a back catalog of items that we will be rolling out over the weeks and months ahead. We introduce new items to the shop each week, and yes there are repeats, and will continue to do this for the foreseeable future. Several of the new items have been very well received by the community, especially some of the Epic outfits.

Our Product team is very closely monitoring and learning from the shop performance. We've had the store open for less than a month, so there's still a LOT to learn.

There is no incentive for retention and I swear and promise that the CHAPTERS system will be nothing more than finding items and bullsh*t that have lore pieces to them. It will at most have 1 cosmetic skin, but it 100% will not be a competent battle pass. Assuming this is correct, which is what they've hinted that it's going to be heavily story based (and it is not PVE they confirmed that), it's going to be the death of the already dying game.

I'd ask you to reserve judgement based on the offerings presented to you in the first Chapter, following the Prologue. One of the biggest things we want to avoid is the Chapters being perceived as lackluster (please note, I'm making a distinction between Chapters and Prologue here). We know that players will want a high degree of perceived value in the Chapter feature, and our goal is to deliver this.

Why do you think Hollow is Twitch giveaway RNG only? Because otherwise no one is going to watch their streams. Even then, the streams peak at 1.5k people, and there's no actual useful info in them. If anything, they should remove the dev stream and just have a monthly update stream where we actually get roadmap updates or some sort of useful information. They refuse to address bugs or if they do on stream, it's just "yeah that's a problem email support". They are more concerned with putting political statements as keywords for giveaways than they are to give information or respond about game problems.

I get that you think that the stream is the place to address bugs (which we do acknowledge frequently), but it's not. There's zero we can do on stream to triage, report them upwards, or otherwise. We're focused on engaging with stream chat, answering the hundreds of questions we get per stream, and playing the game.

I addressed your comment about political statements below, but to reiterate: we never make political statements on stream. We do not endorse a political party, and we do not encourage you to vote for one candidate over another. That would be counterproductive, as our audience is global, and for the most part probably could care less about national politics.

Empty promises. A lot of the issues have been prevalent since alpha and beta. A lot of us have given the same feedback, and it has gone ignored. A lot of people have complained about the way conduit functions even before the AA issue, and it went ignored. Many of us alpha players have felt conduit just doesn't belong in the game in it's current state. If someone is good at tracking, there's literally nothing you can do in a reasonable time due to the high damage, etc..

Aim Assist has been addressed in last night's update. Early indicators are that the change was effective, and player sentiment is generally high around it.

Edit: we will continue to monitor player feedback about AA. Jesse has made the statement that we don't consider it a done deal and believe it's something we'll have to keep an eye on.

I also want to make a clear statement about something: just because you don't agree with the change we make, or do not make, does not mean we don't listen to feedback. If you watch our streams, converse with us in Discord, or even check Jesse's many posts here on the subreddit, you'll notice that we regularly acknowledge and address feedback.

You don't have to agree with us, and we fully expect that you won't on many issues. That's ok.

We are aware of the ongoing discussion and criticism of the overall mechanics of the Conduit Class. I don't have anything additional to say about it, other than it is actively discussed in our internal feedback channels and that the combat team has seen and registered the feedback.

edit to clean up some grammatical mistakes.

More game modes, improving the new player experience, etc, are all things that are equally as important to us. :)

We're actively working on more reasons to keep playing the game once you're past the initial starting phase.

I understand a lot of the bugs and stuff, game dev is hard but this issue is something that would be easy to fix, I'm sure some of the better players would be willing to wait a little bit just to get a lobby of good players vs bots and fresh players. I know I would at least.

I can understand how it might appear that the items you've outlined above as being an easy fix. While there are some adjustments that we can make rapidly (how the queues are balanced out), many QOL improvements require time invested and prioritization.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

By no means do we think we're right about everything, and are very quick to be critical of ourselves.

For example: The point that we're working on Seasonal content (the Chapters) is meant to directly address the criticism that we need to give players more reasons to keep playing Spellbreak. We agree with this sentiment, and have prioritized it accordingly :).

We're not afraid to take a stance, and will acknowledge when we are wrong about said stance.

It didn't, and I understand and empathize with what you're saying here.

Hopefully your friends will give Clash a look when that comes out.